Pages

6/01/2008

About the Unofficial Mathieu Schneider Homepage

In the beginning...

The Unofficial Mathieu Schneider Homepage was created August 1998, by me, the Coolest Mathieu Schneider Fan on Earth (remember when that was the NHL's motto?). It started as a free Geocities website. I was a bored college student, living on a small rural campus with no car, and desperately trying to avoid responsibilities. I started the site as a way to teach myself HTML, to give me a distraction, and then it became a way keep up with my favorite hockey player.

By the time I graduated and my responsibilities (i.e., job, grad school, life in general) became harder to avoid, the site was too much of a habit to let go. Plus, to my surprise, the site statistics showed quite a few hits. Like thousands of them. I made a pact with myself that I'd keep the site going until Mathieu retired. Sometimes it got pretty bare bones, and not much updating happened, but I've remained faithful to that promise.

In the present...

In the summer of 2008, the 10th anniversary of the site's creation, I decided to make some changes. In 1998, I worked on the site as a way to procrastinate from doing my homework. In the Fall of 2008, I was to teach my first college course, and found myself in the familiar procrastination mode as I tried to prep lectures and create assignments for my own students. Perfect time to renovate the site!

The bulk of the site was always the "News and Notes" section, and the format of that seem perfect for a blog more so than a traditional web page. I'd been thinking about it for awhile, and when Yahoo! (which took over Geocities) raised the monthly rates, I made the jump and moved the site to Blogger and the Unofficial Mathieu Schneider Homepage was reborn as a blog.

In the Future...

As I mentioned, I made a pact to keep the site running until Mathieu retires. And I will. Of course it was easier to maintain when I was a bored college student. But I was able to maintain it while going to grad school and working full time. I'm sure I can continue to maintain it now that I'm an overly ambitious full-time librarian, part-time college instructor who seems to get involved in way too many projects.